Homesick
by The Spectrum Sings
Summary: Home isn't a place to me. Home is Rachel Berry. Home is Rachel lying on the rug, while I play with our dog. Home is the smile on her face when she comes back to me making dinner in the sunshine yellow kitchen of our tiny, bright and messy flat and how she laughs when I burn the pasta to a black, uneatable mess.


Homesick

They say home is where the heart is. I wonder who 'they' are and how they know this. Did they one day wake up with an ache in their chest and a hole in their heart where home should be? I wonder what I would say to them, if together we could understand where home is, what home is, how home works. Let's go home, I might say, let's stop this heartbreak that lingers from dusk until dawn and from dawn until dusk. Home isn't a place to me. Home is Rachel Berry. Home is Rachel lying on the rug, while I play with our dog, Susie. Home is the smile on her face when she comes back to me making dinner in the sunshine yellow kitchen of our tiny, bright flat and how she laughs when I burn the pasta to a black mess while the fire alarm screeches sounds at me. Home is her singing sweet love songs in the shower because she knows I am listening and home is the smell of her perfume, like jasmine and lilac. I am not homesick for anywhere in particular, I am homesick for Rachel Berry.

Our flat lies in the nooks and crannies, somehow fitting perfectly into a section of New York. It sits above a corner shop with a quiet, little park (more of a patch of dying grass and a single apple tree) in front of us and a railway line behind us that is rarely used. Our flat smells like my shampoo and Rachel's spilled perfume and the roses on the kitchen table that have been slowly rotting to nothing. Our flat consists of a butter mellow kitchen, a violet and mauve bedroom and a sea salt, sea shell, overall sea themed bathroom. It is all so small it could be seen as insignificant, but to us it is simply petite, charming and unpretentious. It's comfortable and it's ours. It's not ours anymore. It's mine.

It's our home and my flat and I am homesick. It isn't home without Rachel. Without Rachel the place seems abandoned and lonesome. The yellow looks pale and sickly. The purples are too dark, too depressing. The blues are a hurricane not an ocean. The flat is a place where memories happened but not where the memories stayed. The flat is cold without Rachel's warmth, without Rachel's pure voice rebounding of the walls. It will never be home again because Rachel isn't coming back.

One day she didn't come home. I burned the pizza, forgot to make salad, dropped water on Susie and broke a cup. Rachel didn't come home. I sat alone at the table, Susie whining beside me and considered. I never truly considered the right thing until I got a phone call. A phone call isn't anything out of the ordinary but this one was. This phone call was silence and tears and broken breathing and disbelief. This phone call was the phone call that made me forever homesick. This was the phone call where Rachel Berry died.

Phrases like "I'm sorry" and "it's too late" and "she's gone" and "car crash."

Words like "No" and "Rachel" and "save her" and "why."

I spent three hours standing with Rachel's dads in silence while we took turns to hold her cold, blue hands and whisper sweet nothings. Her cheeks were wet too, but with our tears.

They say that home is where the heart is. I guess I've gone and lost my home. Can I be homesick forever? God knows I don't want to be. But how do you move on when the bed smells like her perfume and her shampoo is on the side? How do you move on when all her vegan meal plans are on the fridge and there is a clutter of her song notebooks on the kitchen table? I have to let go but I'm clinging so hard to the scent of her. My imagination is fighting to keep my heart pain free and failing. I'll have to let go soon. Throw out the condolence flowers, toss out her shampoo. Let go of something I once thought I could never live without. She was and is such a central part of my life, of my identity, of how I define myself. I am Quinn, Rachel's girlfriend, Rachel's roommate, in love with Rachel, happy with Rachel. I am afraid that once I give this thing up, I, somehow, won't be me anymore. Once I give up on Rachel, I'll be Quinn alone. I already am Quinn alone.

My Rachel is never coming home.


End file.
